Between white tower and black box, author searches for promise of a nation

Maher Mughrabi

At the end of a weekend which saw top US diplomat John Kerry pilloried for suggesting that Israel risked becoming an apartheid state, I talked to Israeli journalist Ari Shavit about his book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. Towards its end, Shavit has this to say about his country's future:

''Will the Jewish state dismantle the Jewish settlements, or will the Jewish settlements dismantle the Jewish state? There are only four paths from this junction: Israel as a criminal state that carries out ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories; Israel as an apartheid state; Israel as a binational state; or Israel as a Jewish-democratic state retreating with much anguish to a border dividing the land. I still believe the Israeli majority prefers the fourth path. But this majority is not solidified or determined.''

This idea of Israel retreating does not occur elsewhere in the book - indeed, My Promised Land is full of forward and upward motion.

''I don't think that moving forward means we're always doing the right thing,'' Shavit says. ''But Israel's triumph is the triumph of life. This is a people who faced extinction, faced death … and yet we've chosen life and we celebrate life and our success is not to become victims of our tragic past.

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''And by the way this is what I wish for the Palestinians … some of the good news in the West Bank in the last decade is that you see a Palestinian generation and a Palestinian movement towards moving forward.''

Shavit later refers to this movement as ''the Rawabi forces'', after a town the Palestinian Authority is building in the West Bank. ''I think the Palestinian obligation will be to build a Rawabi-like project in every piece of land that Israelis evacuate,'' he says.

But that again raises the question of retreat and of the settlements, which in his book Shavit calls an ''untenable demographic, political, moral and judicial reality''. I tell him that Australia's foreign minister wants to know where it says that the settlements are illegal. What would he say to her?

''Well, it's not for me to try to convince Australians … but first of all I'm not into the legal issue. That's not the issue. The issue is how to save the two-state solution … the one-state solution does not work in Iraq, the one-state solution does not work in Syria, the one-state solution will not work in the Holy Land.

''The problem with the settlements is that they are killing the two-state solution … Ironically, the settlement project is a post-Zionist project. It endangers Zionism … and I say this as a patriot and a proud Zionist, not from an international, objective point of view.''

But if international input - and particularly the internationally recognised Green Line between Israel and the territories it has occupied since June 1967 - is set aside, then the debate is essentially an internal one between Jewish Israelis. It pits the grey line, the security barrier created by the Israeli state and its military, against the knitted line created by the activist settlers, with all its random and wild stitches.

In the book, Shavit discusses Israel with close friends, including acclaimed author Amos Oz. In August 2011, Oz came to Melbourne in the midst of the Palestinian bid for recognition of statehood at the United Nations and said that Israel should be the first country to extend such recognition, and that negotiations could come later, between two sovereign states.

''Palestinians will be taking Israel to the international court, Israelis will be taking Palestinians to the international court - we will never get out of it,'' Shavit says. ''It will be first political warfare, then it will deteriorate into violence as well. So I think this is a very bad idea.''

Shavit tells me the reaction to My Promised Land, particularly in America, has surprised him. ''The need to have such a book was very deep,'' he says, adding that his aim was to ''bring the story back … a book that is non-fiction with the qualities of literary fiction''.

I can't help but wonder if those who need this story aren't the same people who needed Israel in the first place: secular, liberal Jews in search of an identity between the twin threats of physical annihilation and cultural assimilation.

''The Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox have survived as a religion, as a civilisation and a community for centuries and millennia,'' Shavit says. ''But for those of us who cannot live that way, who want to be modern Jews and liberal Jews … we need some sort of anchor … we are a small, endangered people.''

In Shavit's final chapters, the dangers are external - with Iran above all - and internal. His childhood in the monolithic, statist Israel of the Labour founders gives way to an Israel of unreconciled ''tribes'': ''In its seventh decade, Israel is much less of a solid nation-state than it was when it was 10 years old,'' he writes.

I put it to him that Israel's difficulties with Iran aren't helped by rhetoric such as that chosen by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Auschwitz in 2010, when he implied Iran was a ''new Amalek'', the Biblical enemy of the Jewish people.

''I'm not the prime minister's PR person … I've never voted for him,'' Shavit says. ''If you look at the real Israel … they're not into Amalek, that's not what's on their minds. That's on the minds of a certain right-wing minority.''

In chapter 15 of his book, Shavit discusses the Israeli economy with his friend Kobi Richter, an elite air force pilot turned business magnate. But in the following chapter, on Iran, Richter's voice is absent. Yet in an interview with Shavit in 2012, he set out a detailed argument against Israeli military action, telling him that ''no one will understand the Holocaust syndrome that makes us see Iran as a combination of the Greeks, the Romans and the Nazis''.

Where is the ''real Israel''? Shavit travels between the white tower in the city of Ramleh, from which his great-grandfather Herbert Bentwich surveyed the land in 1897, and nearby Lydda, whose Palestinian inhabitants were massacred and expelled during the war of 1948. Lydda is Zionism's ''black box'', he concludes.

But the symmetry is too neat. If the tragedy of Lydda is simply an inevitable part of Zionism's triumphal progress, then My Promised Land is another episode of what Israelis cynically call yorim ve bochim - ''shooting and crying'' - which only points inward.

If, as Shavit contends in his book, making peace is about honouring and containing the other, why after more than 60 years can't Israel contain Dahmash?

''We are not where we should be … on the one hand, obviously everybody [should have] total and real equality and the ability to build a home and to have a school … and on the other hand, things have to be done within the law.''

In his book, Shavit travels to a ruined village in the Galilee with the Palestinian-Israeli lawyer Mohammed Dahla.

''Give me your hand, make me your partner,'' Dahla pleads. Yet at the crucial moment, it turns out that ''the legal issue'' does matter after all.

Ari Shavit will speak on My Promised Land at 7.30pm on Wednesday at Monash Caulfield Campus (H1.16 ground floor, H Building). No cost, no bookings.

He will also speak at the Sydney Writers' Festival on Saturday May 24 at 3pm at Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay and appear in conversation with Iranian-American author Reza Aslan on Friday May 23 at 4.30pm at Pier 2/3 Main Stage, Walsh Bay. Both events are ticketed.